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Watch this Lightsquared video accusing commercial GPS manufacturers of infrining on their frequency allocations

Survey Scene, October 2011 LightSquared’s been in the news quite a bit since my last Survey Scene newsletter a month ago, but very little of it has actual consequence. A lot of the “news” is just noise. LightSquared pumped up its propaganda campaign nationwide to try to build a consensus in their favor and put pressure on the FCC, and is threatening a lawsuit if the FCC doesn’t do what LightSquared wants. No surprises there. However, other things have happened that I think you might be interested in hearing about.

US regulators sued hedge fund billionaire Philip Falcone for fraud Wednesday, accusing him of taking $113 million from a fund to pay his taxes. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said Falcone, who raked in billions betting against packaged mortgage securities ahead of the US real-estate crash, took clients' money from funds run by his Harbinger Capital Partners to pay his personal taxes.It also said Falcone illegally manipulated bond prices, traded preferential treatment to investors who backed a controversial board initiative, and broke restricted period trading rules in three initial public offerings to make money on short sales.

A top official at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) told a Republican congressman that the agency is still considering ways to save LightSquared's plan for a high-speed wireless network. The company invested billions of dollars in plans for a nationwide 4G network, but the FCC moved to block the network earlier this year over concerns it would interfere with GPS devices. In a letter sent last month that was obtained by The Hill, Mindel De La Torre, the chief of the FCC's International Bureau, told Rep. John Duncan (R-Tenn.) the agency is "continuing to consider all options for addressing this...

LightSquared filed for bankruptcy on Monday after failing to negotiate a last-minute deal with its lenders to avoid default. Under the Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, LightSquared has sought the company will have an opportunity to restructure itself. The move gives the company and its principal financier, hedge fund magnate Phil Falcone, some running room to devise a new path forward after regulatory setbacks.

Unable to reach a deal with its lenders, upstart wireless carrier LightSquared will file for bankruptcy Monday, according to two sources with knowledge of the company's plans. The move has been widely expected, since the company's options for appeasing its creditors were running out. LightSquare's lenders claim that it has been in default on its debt since its $9 billion partnership with Sprint Nextel

LightSquared made it clear on Friday that it's not going down without a fight. The FCC's decision to stop it from launching its wireless network violated its constitutional rights, it said, vowing to find a way to move forward. "I want to make one thing clear: We are not going away," LightSquared regulatory affairs executive Jeff Carlisle said during a call with reporters. "We know there's too much at stake here to just walk away." After LightSquared was unable to fix major problems with GPS interference, the FCC decided last month to void LightSquared's waiver for its wholesale terrestrial-satellite LTE...

Former Bush administration solicitor general Ted Olson and Eugene Scalia, Justice Scalia's son, will represent LightSquared. Wireless startup LightSquared has hired prominent conservative lawyers Ted Olson, a former U.S. solicitor general, and Eugene Scalia, a son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, as it tries to save its multibillion-dollar plan to build a nationwide 4G wireless network, the company confirmed Tuesday. Although the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted LightSquared a conditional waiver to move forward last year, the commission is now moving to block the company's network over concerns that it would interfere with GPS devices. The hiring of two...

FCC fires back at Sen. Grassley over LightSquaredBy Brendan Sasso - 03/08/12 03:40 PM ET The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) fired back at Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on Thursday after the Republican lawmaker accused the agency of stonewalling his probe over wireless startup LightSquared. On Wednesday, Grassley said the FCC was ignoring his repeated attempts to meet with senior staffers over the agency's decision to grant LightSquared a conditional waiver last year. "Commission staff have attempted to address these issues through multiple conversations with the senator’s staff, including as recently as last week," FCC spokeswoman Tammy Sun said in a...

LightSquared CEO made curious max donation to DNC while seeking White House audience By Matthew Boyle - The Daily Caller   12:37 PM 02/24/2012 Broadband company LightSquared‘s CEO made a maximum-allowable political donation to the Democratic Party on the same day his lawyers were trying to arrange a meeting between him and top White House technology officials, records and emails obtained by The Daily Caller show. Those same records also show a questionable inconsistency, listing the CEO’s employer as a company he hadn’t worked for in a decade.The requests and donation came soon after President Barack Obama’s Federal Communications Commission...

Broadband company LightSquared’s CEO made a maximum-allowable political donation to the Democratic Party on the same day his lawyers were trying to arrange a meeting between him and top White House technology officials, records and emails obtained by The Daily Caller show. Those same records also show a questionable inconsistency, listing the CEO’s employer as a company he hadn’t worked for in a decade.The requests and donation came soon after President Barack Obama’s Federal Communications Commission successfully propped up LightSquared, and subsequently demolished its competitor GlobalStar with regulatory muscle.

Documents and copies of communications obtained by The Daily Caller indicate that the Federal Communications Commission propped up broadband company LightSquared with favorable regulatory decisions and other special treatment, while driving its competition out of business. In August 2008, Wall Street hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners, owned by longtime Democratic political donor Philip Falcone, sought to buy a majority stake in the satellite company SkyTerra — the company that would later become LightSquared. On June 27 of that year, just before Falcone’s Harbinger Capital sought FCC approval for that purchase, Falcone donated $28,500 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. But...

Phil Falcone, the billionaire hedge fund manager whose firm made $11bn (£6.9bn) from the sub-prime crisis, is being sued by investors after a $3bn bet to create a US-wide mobile broadband service appeared to hit the buffer.Mr. Falcone, chief investment officer of Harbinger Capital Partners, stands accused of misleading investors over its decision to invest in the service through its acquisition of LightSquared. Court filings lodged in New York accuse him and one of the firm's investment funds of investing in LightSquared even though the original aim of the fund was to invest in distressed debt and sub-prime mortgages. ...The...

Wireless startup LightSquared might try to swap airwave licenses with similar ones operated by the Defense Department in a last-ditch attempt to save its nationwide network, The Wall Street Journal reports, citing sources familiar with the company's plans.The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) moved to block LightSquared's plans earlier this week after testing showed its network would interfere with millions of GPS devices....The company has until mid-March to receive regulatory approval or its risks losing a multibillion-dollar contract with Sprint.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), acting on a technical committee’s recommendation, will move to suspend LightSquared’s bid to develop a mobile satellite network that has been proven to interfere with GPS reception. ... On Feb. 14, the FCC issued a statement announcing that it had accepted recommendations of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) technical panel that studied the problem and found no practical solutions to GPS interference. That opinion, rendered unanimously in a Jan. 13 letter, concluded that no fix was possible for months—or perhaps years—that would permit the network to operate “without significantly interfering with GPS.”

Wireless start-up LightSquared plans to fight the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) move to reject its proposed nationwide 4G network, a company official told The Hill. Jeff Carlisle, LightSquared's vice president for regulatory affairs, said the company will file a formal comment with the FCC urging the agency not to follow through on its proposal to "indefinitely suspend" LightSquared's authority to operate cell towers. The FCC announced the decision Tuesday night after the president's top adviser on telecom issues concluded there is "no practical way" to prevent LightSquared's network from disrupting GPS devices, including those used in flight safety. When...

In a major victory for the National Legal and Policy Center, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) yesterday reversed itself and revoked a controversial waiver it had granted LightSquared, which would have allowed the company to deploy a national wireless network. The reversal is not only a major setback for LightSquared's billionaire owner Phil Falcone, but puts a harsh spotlight on the role of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. According to Cecelia Kang of the Washington Post Tech blog : The FCC's decision is expected to all but end LightSquared's aspirations to provide mobile broadband services via satellite airwaves -- a...

National Journal calls it "a colossal fall from grace", but it comes only as a political surprise that the FCC acted yesterday to kill off the LightSquared proposal. After an extraordinary one-year grace period to resolve the interference issues of its network with existing GPS systems, the FCC reluctantly admitted that “no practical way” to fix the basic problem of high-powered terrestrial broadcasts on a spectrum slice intended for low-power satellite communications (via Instapundit): The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) moved to reject LightSquared’s planned wireless network on Tuesday after the president’s top adviser on telecom issues said there is “no...

The Federal Communications Commission announced it had revoked its conditional approval for the controversial LightSquared national broadband network. The proposed network was to use airwaves once reserved for satellite-telephone transmissions and had been given a conditional approval by the FCC last year. The FCC’s move follows a statement by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which held that “there is no practical way to mitigate the potential interference [with GPS] at this time.” LightSquared’s plans have been strongly opposed by users of GPS systems, which include the military and the aviation industry. The NTIA tests demonstrated that the company’s network,...

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) today asked the principal behind the LightSquared 4G wireless project to explain a questionable contact to Grassley’s office that intimated benefits for Grassley if he softened his inquiry of government approval of the project. Since last April, Grassley has been reviewing the Federal Communications Commission’s approval of the LightSquared project and the concerns of interference with the Global Positioning System. According to a press release issued from Grassley’s office today, the Senator wrote to Philip Falcone of Harbinger Capital Partners, expressing concern that two separate incidents implied a desire to have Grassley “pull punches” in his...